Chicago: The Second City [Paperback]

A. J. Liebling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

Many Chicagoans rose in protest over A. J. Liebling’s tongue-in-cheek tour of their fair city in 1952. Liebling found much to admire in the Windy City’s people and culture—its colorful language, its political sophistication, its sense of its own history and specialness, but Liebling offended that city’s image of itself when he discussed its entertainments, its built landscapes, and its mental isolation from the world’s affairs.

Liebling, a writer and editor for the New Yorker, lived in Chicago for nearly a year. While he found a home among its colorful inhabitants, he couldn’t help comparing Chicago with some other cities he had seen and loved, notably Paris, London, and especially New York. His magazine columns brought down on him a storm of protests and denials from Chicago’s defenders, and he gently and humorously answers their charges and acknowledges his errors in a foreword written especially for the book edition. Liebling describes the restaurants, saloons, and striptease joints; the newspapers, cocktail parties, and political wards; the university; and the defining event in Chicago’s mythic past, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Illustrated by Steinberg, Chicago is a loving, if chiding, portrait of a great American metropolis.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Alex Kotlowitz''s Never a City So Real has a different style and tone from A.J. Liebling''s 1952 tongue-in-cheek book about Chicago, but they belong on the same elevated bookshelf of Chicago classics. The series in The New Yorker that this book is based on elicited a slew of protests from Chicagoans, which Liebling answers in this witty volume."—Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune

(Elizabeth Taylor The Chicago Tribune )

"Good entertainment. The book is attractively designed, the illustrations are first-rate and Mr. Liebling can write."—New York Times

(New York Times )

"Mr. Liebling''s entertaining book can be highly recommended."—New York Herald Tribune

(New York Herald Tribune )

"He has shown his readers in his lively, sardonic style exactly the split-personality city that he feels Chicago to be."—San Francisco Chronicle

(San Francisco Chronicle )

From the Inside Flap

Many Chicagoans rose in protest over A. J. Liebling’s tongue-in-cheek tour of their fair city in 1952. Liebling found much to admire in the Windy City’s people and culture—its colorful language, its political sophistication, its sense of its own history and specialness, but Liebling offended that city’s image of itself when he discussed its entertainments, its built landscapes, and its mental isolation from the world’s affairs.

Liebling, a writer and editor for the New Yorker, lived in Chicago for nearly a year. While he found a home among its colorful inhabitants, he couldn’t help comparing Chicago with some other cities he had seen and loved, notably Paris, London, and especially New York. His magazine columns brought down on him a storm of protests and denials from Chicago’s defenders, and he gently and humorously answers their charges and acknowledges his errors in a foreword written especially for the book edition. Liebling describes the restaurants, saloons, and striptease joints; the newspapers, cocktail parties, and political wards; the university; and the defining event in Chicago’s mythic past, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Illustrated by Steinberg, Chicago is a loving, if chiding, portrait of a great American metropolis.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803280351
• ISBN-13: 978-0803280359
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,310,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Only Completely Corrupt City in America", June 11, 2005

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chicago: The Second City (Paperback)

The 1890 census showed that, for the first time, Chicago was the second most populous city in the nation, supplanting Philadelphia. New York, then as now, remained at the top. This one-down relationship gave the Windy City its other famous nickname, "The Second City," which in this book suggests both its inferiority to New York and its incessant striving. Chicagoans seem ambivalent about their status. "People you meet at a party devote a great deal more time than people elsewhere to talking about good government, but they usually wind up the evening boasting about the high quality of the crooks they have met." An alderman tells Liebling that Chicago "is the only completely corrupt city in America." When Liebling reminds him of other corrupt cities, the alderman replies defensively, 'But they aren't nearly as big.'"

Essayist, reporter, humorist A.J. Liebling, himself a New Yorker (who first visited Chicago in 1938, and lived there for about a year between 1949 and 1950, and briefly in 1951), takes a Big Apple-centric view in these 1953 essays originally published in The New Yorker, a magazine to which he frequently contributed. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his sports writing, especially boxing ("The Sweet Science)" and each year pugilism's top journalistic prize is the "A.J. Liebling Award." Here, Liebling takes aim at the decline of Chicago in the arts, industry, and design, noting the city's brief but glorious apotheosis at the turn of the century and its largely futile self-aggrandizement since then. "The city consequently has the personality of man brought up in the expectation of a legacy who has learned in middle age that it will never be his." As a good journalist, Liebling wanted to discover the cause of the turnabout, and Chicago natives who agreed with him offered their own theories:

"Chicago could have had the automobile if Chicago money had gone after it,' a Chicago stockbroker once assured me. "But the big boys let it go by default, they didn't want an industry here that would dwarf them.'" Others trace it to the pacifist stance of Jane Addams (of Hull House fame) during the WWI. In any event, says Liebling, Chicago has been playing catch-up ever since, and the native seems to feel taken. Plays in Chicago are presumed inferior to the New York production of the same play, or, "if they are the New York production, with original casts intact," the actors are presumed to give an inferior performance. Mid-20th Chicago's response to its percieved victimization and inferiority is a pathetic boosterism; pathetic because, try as it may, the Second City's efforts are invariably second-rate, bourgeois, and unknowingly kitschy. FOr example, Liebling complains that Chicago restuarants, unlike those in New York, feel they must actually convince you drink or dine, and so stage hokey shows and color their menus with decorous prose:

"The Porterhouse, a restaurant in the Hotel Sherman, when I last looked in on it, had six cowboys violinists in fringed pants to play "Tales from the Vienna Woods," at your table in order to sell you a hamburger, and the menu listed credits for costume and scenic design. The urge to embellishment found literary outlet in the listing of things to eat, such as `Ah, the PORTERHOUSE! Aristocrat of steaks...most delectable of steaks. Greatest of all the steaks, for within it are encompassed the Tenderloin, the Sirloin, the meaty bone of the full loin.'"

As in his brilliant "The Telephone Booth Indian," Liebling seems drawn to the proletariat, and especially, the scam. Part of Liebling's appeal-and his power as a satirist-is his ability to cloak subjective opinion in the details and tone of the objective journalist. His field reports, however, are highly selective. Liebling's liberal quoting of slang adds to his authenticity: "The Chicago bars also employ blondes known as dice girls, who...keep score on customers attempting a ten-dice game called Twenty-Six. If you win, the house pays four to one, which gives it a seventeen-percent edge. This is about the same as the take of the parimutual machines in New York State. The bar, however, pays its four to one in trade, on which there is a profit of perhaps three hundred percent. One of my most astute Chicago friends, a native, believes the girls [cheat]. I do not believe this for a minute, but it illustrates the working of the Chicago mind. It is inconceivable to my friend that the house should be content with the monumental advantage it already has." Liebling also toys with the Chicago natives who wrote to protest his "New Yorker" pieces. One critic wrote that he hoped he would be the first to "...grasp the hand of Mr. Liebling as he staggers (I hope) backward from reading such reactionaries as this one of many of which he must be in recipience daily!" Liebling, explaining that he will add some of his own comments to the book's footnotes, writes that he has "added a few of my own reactionaries to those of which I have been in recipience."

Saul Steinberg, also of "New Yorker" fame, augments the text with his stylized line drawings. Liebling writes that the view from Lake Michigan is a "serrated wall of high buildings," but that Chicagoans know that "what they see is like a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it"; Steinberg draws a convincing picture of a façade. The sense of fakery extends to Chicago's long running scams in politics, the judicial system, and law enforcement. Liebling interviews a crooked otherwise well-intentioned alderman, who innocently talks about his responsibilites to procure (i.e., buy) votes and procure jobs for the loyal. He describes the city's fixation on the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre, contrasting this with its shorter attention span to current, but more prosaic homicides. Other objects of Liebling's reportage include Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, Chicago sports (though this section is surprisingly brief), strip joints' fleecing of conventioneers, racial tensions ("Chicago's greatest present danger"), and Chicago's intellectual climate: "Everyone you meet belongs to a Great Books Discussion Group [but] the samplings of them are exceedingly small." "In Chicago intellectual circles, a man who can't do a psychoanalysis between two Martinis ranks with a fellow who can't change a tire."

"The Second City" is an interesting though largely dated book; many of the then-current colloquialisms and allusions are obscure today. While Liebling doesn't seem secretly fond of Chicago, his other books suggest that he sees urban and proletarian shortcomings as something indelible in the American way, and there's a kind of sympathetic undertone. However, Chicagoans (and others) who read this Liebling book only might rightfully take offense at some of his pot shots, comments that seem to unfairly single out Chicago. Although Liebling is a master wordsmith and his dry humor is keen, the writing doesn't seem quite as nimble, witty, and strong as in "The Sweet Science" (about boxing) or the aforementioned "Telephone Booth Indian." Still, Liebling's observations skills--his eye and ear for the telling quote or description-are intact and entertaining.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Would he have felt otherwise about the Third?, July 23, 2007

By 

bukhtan (Chicago, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chicago: The Second City (Paperback)

A.J. Liebling is America's most incisive and poetic journalist. And Chicago is a city worth reading and writing about. But this is not the place to start reading Liebling or reading about Chicago.

Joe Liebling was not of the "what, where, when, who" style of journalism., He needed something to spark his creative interest, someone to admire, if only a likeable rogue. Liebling found nothing and nobody in Chicago to admire, just plain rogues. And here the rogues were Republican press barons, Colonel McCormack of the Chicago Tribune foremost among them. His professional enemies. Moreover, Liebling was bored by what we now call "Middle America", and he didn't like being bored, either.

Unlike his colleague Joe Mitchell at the New Yorker (most of whose work is collected in "Up in the old hotel"), Liebling didn't subscribe to "nihil humanum a me alienum puto". There were simply people and places out there that he had no use for. New York City con men, Norwegian sailors, Louisiana rabble rousers and Nevada cowboys have their place in Liebling's world, but 3 million people all trying to conform to something they themselves couldn't define did not. That's the way Liebling understood Chicago. The various Bohemias that Chicago had nourished or tolerated (see Kenneth Rexroth's "Autobiographical novel, for some examples) were reduced or gleichgeschaltet by Liebling's visit in the Fifties. He hated the place so much that he never made the connections that would help him see behind the facade that Chicago was so anxious to present to the world.

In spite of all I've just said, this is actually an entertaining and in some ways very enlightening book, especially for those now living in Chicagoland. Those unfamiliar with Liebling (and Chicago) might better try his early paean to his native New York City, "Back where I came from", in which Liebling employed his unforgiving eye and mordancy of phrase much more productively.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Prose but a Dated Message., May 18, 2005

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Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chicago: The Second City (Paperback)

This is the second A.J. Liebling book that I've read. The first was Between Meals which was absolutely fantastic. Chicago... is a beautiful piece of reportage about the city in which I live. It is marred (seriously) only by its shrunken size. It is a mere 140 pages long and much of the text is bloated by lengthy footnotes and cartoons. Liebling's description of my town is a riveting historical relic that recreates the personality of Colonel McCormick, the newspapers of the past, a social scene that has no bearing to current reality, and demographics that are totally baffling to present residents. This a fifties, pre-riots take on the second city and, as such, one cannot help but be surprised by some of its rhetoric. Parts of the city that were in massive decline then are worth more than all but a few areas in the United States now. This is notably true of the Old Town neighborhood which once possessed only German and Hungarian restaurants but now is a lively center of commerce with one bedroom condos worth as much or more than mansions in the suburbs. Yet Liebling, like everyone else, should not be faulted for not predicting the future as gentrification is something that few thought possible until the eighties--which was long after he died. Nearly all readers will marvel at the complexity and grandeur of his style, however. This man was king of the metaphor as cliches were unknown to him. His example enriches all writers who come across him. If I were you though, I'd try to find these essays for free online somewhere because the price is too excessive for what you actually receive. It's just too short to justify a cover price of $19.95.